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Posts Tagged ‘public schools’

How can every human being on the planet not spend their days being puzzled about pretty much everything? Every day I ask myself questions like: How does that work? Why did that happen? Who was responsible for that? What was the purpose of that? Where did that come from? Constantly, one or more of the [...]

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When I was a young fellow, turned 14, the minimum age at which you could leave school, people demanded of my mother that I leave school, get a job, support the family. Fair enough. No one in the family had ever, for financial reasons, stayed at school past that age. And it was what people [...]

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Australian Census Day has come again (can it really be five years since the last one?). People complain about having to fill in a form, just as they complain about having to vote, but I enjoy it (although given my somewhat unusual history and circumstances some questions make me pause to think). In fact I [...]

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Barry O’Farrell (Premier of New South Wales) is now under pressure it seems from both the far right (Fred Nile and the Shooters) and the right (federal minister Martin Ferguson). The Shooters and Fishers have already put a stop to protecting marine life (a ten year moratorium not just 5 years as I thought when [...]

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The other day I heard the usual glib discussion of “discipline in schools” on some tv channel. About how terrible it was that teachers these days were subject to violence (certainly any violence against teachers is terrible, but as an aside I think there is a convenient forgetting about history here, as is so often [...]

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Heard both another politician and Rupert Murdoch calling for “educational reform” the other day and shuddered. It will always turn out to be not reform in the sense of making things better for children and teachers, the sort of thing us ordinary mortals mean when we talk about reform. Instead it will turn out to [...]

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Because I am a philanthropist, in words if not finances, can I offer a couple of free suggestions to Julia Gillard and the Labor Party. I mean you are doing about as well as Gordon Brown just before the Cameron landslide, or John Howard before the Kevin Rudd one. Sorry, that was a bit mean-spirited [...]

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When Maggie Thatcher announced her doctrine that there was no such thing as society, just millions of people selfishly doing their own thing and corporations ever expanding their profits, it would have been hard to imagine, like the shot heard around the world, her views ever being of relevance in the Yass River Valley. But [...]

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I understand why people are afraid of cars crashing through their living rooms; or catching an incurable disease; or having a meteorite fall out of the sky and crush them, stone dead.

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Julia Gillard’s league tables are going to take us back to Dickensian times

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